Stagg Editorial- July 1995

COMMON SENSE IN ONTARIO

Ontario citizens have voted in Mike Harris as their new premier in an emphatic condemnation of the meddling oppression of the "New Socialism" practiced by Bob Rae and the accidental New Democratic government. Common sense and practicality are to replace vacuous socialist cant. Merit and frugality are to be the orders of the day when it comes to who and how many work for government in Ontario.

In the 1995 election it was the ordinary working person who carried the day for Harris and his Progressive Conservative party. These hard-pressed voters who worked like dogs to make mortgage payments and to avoid the ugly thrusts of the legions of political correctness for the five years of the Rae regime rose up like the good soldiers who are their ancestors and smote the commissars of correctness a fatal political blow. In the brick and mortar neighborhoods of Toronto the bloodied but unvanquished workers joined with their fellow citizens in small towns all across the landscape to throw out the government ruling class.

It may seem incongruous to invoke the image of an uprising of workers to explain the Harris victory but it is an apt and accurate explanation for what happened at street level in Ontario during the forty day struggle for the helm of government. People working for themselves and working for others in private industry realized half-way through the election campaign that the moribund New Democrats and the empty Liberals simply wanted to be elected as the usual nominees of the publicly paid ruling class that had run Ontario like some bumbling Stalinist collective for the last ten years. Voters accepted that their common self-interest lay in throwing out a parasitic form of governing that drew its support from government policies that imposed excessive rules and oppressive public etiquette on its citizens in the interests of enlarging the already bloated public service. In short we threw out the crowd who made expensive "make work" projects a way of life and a career for its practitioners.

The old political adage that there is wisdom in the crowd was much in evidence for anyone who tramped the hot and humid political hustings during the campaign. Voters became cautiously willing to give the Tories the chance to clean up ten years of self-indulgent waste brought to them by David Peterson and Bob Rae. They did so in full realization of the limits of government and the tendency of the governors to lose touch with the street. They put some stock in the Harris capacity for good old-fashioned common sense.

Now it is up to Mike Harris to make Ontario work like the powerful industrial engine it was twenty years ago. That is good for Ontario and ultimately good for all of Canada.

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